ncertain or ambiguous
terms. And what is this guaranty? Is it a guaranty of slavery? No. It is
a guaranty of something flatly incompatible with slavery: a guaranty of
"a republican form of government to every state in this union."

And what is "a republican form of government?" It is where the
government is a commonwealth--the property of the public, of the mass of
the people, or of the entire people. It is where the government is made
up of, and controlled by the combined will and power of the public, or
the mass of the people--and where, of natural consequence, it will have,
for its object, the protection of the rights of all. It is indispensable
to a republican form of government, that the public, the mass of the
people, if not the entire people, participate in the grant of powers to
the government, and in the protection afforded by the government. It is
impossible, therefore, that a government, under which any considerable
number of the people, (if indeed any number of the people,) are
disfranchised and enslaved, can be a republic. A slave government is an
oligarchy; and one too of the most arbitrary and criminal character.

Strange that men, who have eyes capable of discovering in the
constitution so many covert, implied and insinuated guaranties of crime
and slavery, should be blind to the legal import of so open, explicit
and peremptory a guaranty of freedom, equality and right.

Even if there had really been, in the constitution, two such
contradictory guaranties, as one of liberty or republicanism in every
state of the Union, and another of slavery in every state where one
portion of the people might succeed in enslaving the rest, one of these
guaranties must have given way to the other--for, being plainly
inconsistent with each other, they could not have stood together. And it
might safely have been left either to legal or to moral rules to
determine which of the two should prevail--whether a provision to
perpetuate slavery should triumph over a guaranty of freedom.

But it is constantly asserted, in substance, that there is "_no
propriety_" in the general government's interfering in the local
governments of the states. Those who make this assertion appear to
regard a state as a single individual, capable of managing his own
affairs, and of course unwilling to tolerate the intermeddling of
others. But a state is not an individual. It is made up of large numbers
of individuals, each and all of whom, amid the